If you’ve been holding out hope for an all-new entry in the ultra-charming Mario & Luigi series, you may want to brace yourself for some bad news – the series’ developer AlphaDream has gone bankrupt. According to a report from Yahoo Japan, bankruptcy proceedings were forced on AlphaDream by the Tokyo District Court as the studio has racked up ¥400 million (around $3.7 million) in debt. That may not sound like that much, but AlphaDream was a relatively small studio with less than 50 employees.

AlphaDream was founded back in 2000 by a number of former Square Enix employees who worked on that company’s classic 16 and 32-bit titles. The team remained tight-knit, stubbornly using old-school hand-drawn art for all their games – even the later 3DS Mario & Luigi games still used super-detailed sprites to create a 3D effect rather than polygonal models. In addition to the Mario & Luigi series, AlphaDream also made a series of adorable Hamtaro games based on the popular anime.

That's pretty bad, and I hope the employees all find their feet. It's weird that they went bankrupt though given that they've made nothing but good games and I can't understand how they didn't sell well.